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Aspiring young wildlife photographers are urged to get out their cameras and get snapping to be in with a chance of winning this year’s WildPix competition, led by RSPB and British Wildlife Photography Awards.

There were 4,000 entries to the two youth categories of the competition last year – under 12s and 12 to 18 age groups – submitted from young people across the UK. Entries don’t need to feature exotic creatures or locations to be in with a chance of winning. Last year’s winner in the under-12’s category scooped the top prize with a stunning photo of a chaffinch taken in his own back garden in Groombridge, Kent.

Suzanne Welch, RSPB Head of Youth and Education, said; ‘The WildPix competition is a great way for young people to get close to the nature around them, in their gardens, local park or nature reserve. Don’t forget our town and city centres have a wealth of wildlife that might surprise people too. Last year’s winner proves that even the most everyday species like a chaffinch can be photographed in an exciting and imaginative way, and we hope our annual Big Garden Birdwatch event last weekend inspires some wonderful entries from gardens.’

Entries are open until 4 May and the winners will be announced in September. Judges include the well-known wildlife photographer and cameraman Charlie Hamilton James, and the editor of the RSPB’s award-winning BIRDS magazine Mark Ward.

Winning images will be published in ‘British Wildlife Photography Awards: Collection 4‘ out later this year, as well as the RSPB youth magazines, and will be displayed along with winners in all twelve categories of this year’s competition in a travelling exhibition.

Readers will remember George Bush standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 declaring “mission accomplished” in Iraq.

Readers will also recall Tony Blair’s triumphal visit to Washington after the successful US invasion of Afghanistan, carried out with British support.

They both milked their moments of glory “in the face of terrible adversity” and they are now both bitterly remembered as the people who started the misbegotten “war on terror” in 2001 and misled us into a war in Iraq in 2003.

Unfortunately President Francois Hollande seems to have fallen into the same trap by ordering massive French military involvement in Mali.

Troops have occupied much of the northern part of the country and are now fanning out across the desert.

Hollande couldn’t resist the temptation of a day trip to Timbuktu to be photographed with cheering soldiers and adoring citizens.

He may well come to regret this moment of triumphalism, and should perhaps reflect a little more on the history of the region and where such posturing leads to.

Mali is a colonial creation. The area was first colonised by the French in 1815 – interestingly, only 26 years after the French revolution – which later consolidated its control over most of north Africa.

By the time of the 1880s Berlin conferences, set up to “regulate” European colonisation in Africa, France was able to claim control of most of north Africa as French colonies or, in the case of Algeria, a French department.

The borders were straight lines drawn on maps by Europeans who had never been there, slicing through natural barriers, linguistic communities and ethnic groups.

With the rise of African independence movements in the ’50s and ’60s, the French followed the British obsession with federations and initially established the short-lived Mali Federation formed by a union between Senegal and the Sudanese Republic.

The federation collapsed shortly after independence, in 1960, and the Sudanese Republic was renamed the Republic of Mali that same year.

The establishment of Mali, as even Defence Secretary Philip Hammond conceded to me last week, was illogical. It lumped together a number of entirely different cultures, including the Mande, Fula, Voltaic and Songhai, plus the Tuareg and Muars who are traditionally nomadic and inhabit the northern region.

The Tuareg people have significant populations in seven north African countries and number 4.2 million overall.

Tuareg nationalists have been campaigning for the establishment of a Tuareg state, which would obviously impinge on the national frontiers of many of those countries.

Similar situations have arisen in Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria with the Kurdish people, who are likewise denied their own national identity – not unlike the Palestinians.

The main nationalist group in Mali, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, was joined in the fight for independence by a number of Islamist groups, including Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

While the UN resolution 2085, passed in December, specifically condemns al-Qaida, it is rather reserved on the behaviour of the Malian army towards people in the north of the country, where there have been well documented accounts of human rights abuses and summary executions.

These include the summary execution of two dozen civilians in Sevare on January 10. The bodies were subsequently dumped in a well, as reported by Amnesty International’s Mali researcher.

The very lengthy UN resolution, which runs to 25 clauses, does remind Mali of its need to observe human rights and calls for a sustainable solution, but is vague on the question of the legitimacy of the existing government in Mali. The government, like some of its predecessors, gained power through a coup.

There is a section on political process within the resolution, which calls for elections to be held by April, or as soon as technically possible. There are no signs of that happening.

As late as last November, dialogue was taking place between the Malian government and the rebels.

The negotiations broke down, but once France launched its massive intervention – with Britain’s ready support – the situation rapidly deteriorated.

There is no doubt that the oil and gas reserves under the Sahara are enormous and extensive, and that France depends very heavily on those supplies for its own economy. It also relies on the region’s uranium, which fuels the French nuclear power industry. Nuclear provides 80 per cent of French electricity supplies.

But French self-interest aside, one must ask the question of where all of this leads to.

Mali’s 13 million people have an average life expectancy of just 49 and only a quarter of the people have basic literacy skills. Its poverty levels are appalling, with no prospect of improvement in sight.

The bombardment has all the hallmarks of 20th century wars – Western-manufactured super-advanced technology being deployed on poor people in poor countries.

There has been a political failure to recognise that the post-colonial exclusion of Tuareg people is at the heart of this conflict – a situation that has been very deftly exploited by al-Qaida.

Until now David Cameron has been relatively cautious in military activities to avoid being seen as another Tony Blair.

Yet the alacrity with which he responded to Hollande’s request to be involved in this war shows that there’s been a fundamental change in his attitude.

Indeed it’s an interesting question as to why France requested British logistical support anyway.

Cameron reported to the House of Commons on the initial involvement and since then the British presence has risen to about 400 service personnel, a figure that is set to rise further.

Yet still there has been no debate in Parliament. And the lack of a war crimes Act means that the PM could claim his right to send in forces under the royal prerogative.

This century has seen wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now more spreading all over north Africa as the combination of unrequited political demands and the presence of huge mineral resources draw Western forces in.

In the end, peace can only come through a political settlement, respect for human rights and the raising of living standards of the very poorest people whose wealth has been leeched away by the West.

Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North.

Festering differences in the Malian army were graphically exposed today when government soldiers stormed the camp of the Red Beret presidential guard in Bamako, leaving one person dead and five others wounded: here.

One small bird now has a lot more habitat to enjoy, thanks to protection from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. According to the Deseret News, more than 200,000 acres of riparian land along more than 1,200 miles of rivers in several western states is now guarded against adverse development, and it is hoped that the protective measure can help safeguard the endangered southwestern subspecies of the willow flycatcher.

Parts of Utah, Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado are included in the protected zones. While the areas are not automatically designated as preserves, this first step in habitat conservation may lead to better analysis of developments as they could harm the endangered species.

Have you seen the southwestern willow flycatcher? Share your sightings in the comments!

Written and directed by Peter Mullan and starring Eileen Walsh, Dorothy Duffy, Nora-Jane Noone, Anne-Marie Duff, and Geraldine McEwan, The Magdalene Sisters is based on true events depicted in the documentary, Sex in a Cold Climate.

Mullan’s film tells the story of three Dublin women in 1964, fictional composites of real cases. Abandoned by society and cast out by their families for crimes they did not commit, these women found themselves stripped of their liberty and dignity and condemned to indefinite sentences of manual labor. Within the church-run Magdalene Laundries, they were forced into institutional servitude in order to cleanse themselves of the “sins” of which they had been accused.

The Magdalene Laundries were institutions sponsored and maintained by the Catholic Church in Ireland for the incarceration of young women thought to be a moral danger to themselves and others – unmarried mothers or simply girls who were considered hussies and whores, no better than they should be.

With the legal consent of their fathers, they were imprisoned and made to work for no pay in imitation of Mary Magdalene in laundries, always exploited and in many cases sexually abused. The laundries existed until the 1970s, but the very last did not close until 1996. Peter Mullan has remarked that the film was initially made because victims of Magdalene Asylums had received no closure in the form of recognition, compensation, or apology, and many remained lifelong devout Catholics. Former Magdalen inmate Mary-Jo McDonagh told Mullan that the reality of the Magdalene Asylums was much worse than depicted in the film.

But his regrets didn’t amount to a formal government apology and fell far short of what had been demanded by campaigners.

An 18-month investigation into the shameful workhouses went into the Irish state’s involvement in the vicious exploitation of vulnerable women in the Catholic church’s chain of Magdalene Laundries between 1922 and 1996.

But the report went nowhere near reflecting the criticisms of campaigners and the victims themselves, minimising both the number of victims and the depth of their suffering.

Contrary to claims by some victims, Mr Kenny told the Dail that the report found no evidence of sexual abuse in the laundries, that 10 per cent of inmates were sent by their families and 19 per cent entered of their own volition.

The money-spinning chain of laundries was run by four orders of nuns, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, Mercy, Charity and the Good Shepherd.

The state sent girls and women into the laundry system through courts and mother-and-baby homes and then abandoned them.

The women earned nothing and were even deprived of their names.

They were locked in and forced to work long hours in dreadful conditions.

Women who tried to escape were rounded up by police and returned.

Girls as young as two were consigned to the laundries and left there to work unpaid, some for the rest of their lives.

The Irish government has acknowledged that women in the laundries were abuse victims, but the victims have received no compensation.

Ten days earlier, on the third anniversary of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, municipal officials and officials from the Civil Protection Agency forcibly evicted around 600 families from Camp Place Sainte-Anne, also in Port-au-Prince.

Amnesty is calling on the authorities to stop all illegal and violent evictions of people living in make-shift camps and take meaningful steps to provide them with appropriate housing.

According to information gathered by Amnesty, the families evicted from camp Fanm Koperativ were not given any notice of the eviction.

They were forced out of their make-shift tents by the police accompanied by a group of men armed with machetes and hammers.

Suze Mondesir, a member of the camp committee, recounted their ordeal: ‘Around 10am a group of police officers accompanied by men armed with machetes and knives arrived at the camp.

‘They insulted us and began to demolish our tents.

‘The men pushed us around and the police waved their guns at us to prevent us from reacting.’

A few days before the eviction, residents had organised a press conference to denounce the lack of response from the authorities regarding their situation.

Residents believe that the expulsion might have happened as a reprisal to that.

Javier Zúñiga, Special Advisor at Amnesty International, said: ‘Evicting people living in make-shift camps inflicts yet more trauma on people who have already lost everything in the earthquake.

‘By not even allowing them time to gather their things and by leaving them out on the street, the authorities are denying earthquake victims their dignity.

‘Forcing people out of camps must be avoided at all costs, and there must be genuine consultation and the provision of adequate alternative housing before any eviction takes place.

‘The Haitian authorities must prioritise the housing needs of those people still living in dire conditions in displacement camps three years after the earthquake.’

Women have been particularly affected by the eviction as they have not only lost their homes and belongings but also their small business initiatives.

Cléane Etienne, a resident from Camp Fanm Koperatif said: ‘They kicked over the pot of coffee which I was going to sell. That was my livelihood. Now I need money to start over.’

Another woman said: ‘Not only did we lose our belongings but we also had to buy wood and tarpaulins to rebuild our shelters, because we have nowhere else to go.’

The residents at Camp Place Sainte-Anne were informed of the eviction only five days in advance and were promised 20,000 gourdes (approximately £330) per family.

However, according to the local organisation Groupe d’Appui aux Refugiés et Repatriés, 250 families have yet to receive the money.

On the day of the eviction, none of the families were given enough time to gather their belongings before their shelters were destroyed.

Carnise Delbrun, a member of the camp committee in Camp Place Sainte-Anne, said: ‘We saw municipal officials firing in the air, throwing stones so we would leave, the police came later to back them up.

‘Four people were hurt including a one year-old baby and a five year-old child who were injured by a plank of wood when the municipal officials were destroying their tent.

‘Other residents were hit by stones and a lot of us lost money, mobile phones and other personal effects.’

On 12 January 2010, a devastating earthquake in Haiti left 200,000 dead and 2.3 million people homeless. Hundreds of millions of pounds were pledged in interntional aide.

American troops were sent in and fired on the poor of the working class area of Port-au-Prince accusing them of looting when in fact they were trying to secure bottled water for their families.

Many sea creatures convert carbon dioxide in the waters into calcium carbonate which is essentially chalk. Species such as clams, oysters and corals use it to make their shells and other bony parts.
Bubbling under

When the team at Newcastle looked at the larvae of sea urchins they found that there were high concentrations of nickel on their external skeletons.

Working with extremely small nickel particles, the researchers found that when they added them to a solution of carbon dioxide in water, the nickel completely removed the CO2.

“It is a simple system,” Dr Lidija Siller from Newcastle University told BBC News. “You bubble CO2 through the water in which you have nickel nanoparticles and you are trapping much more carbon than you would normally – and then you can easily turn it into calcium carbonate.”

The Galapagos Islands, which lie in the Pacific Ocean some 1,000 km west of the Ecuadorian mainland, served as a natural laboratory that inspired English scientist Charles Darwin to develop his theory about evolution, natural selection and the origin of species.

April 2014: Two women have been sentenced to a year in jail after 13 endangered iguanas were seized at Heathrow. Romanian nationals Angla-Alina Bita, 26, and Vitora-Oliva Bucsa, 24, had arrived on a flight from the Bahamas and were due to fly on to Dusseldorf, Germany when iguanas were discovered in their luggage. Each iguana had been individually wrapped in a sock before being stuffed into suitcases. Twelve survived their journey but one died in transit. The iguanas were identified as San Salvador rock iguanas, a species so rare that only a few hundred are known to be in existence. As such they are controlled under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES): here.

Mar. 26, 2013 — Increasing tourism and the spread of marine invasive non-native species is threatening the unique plant and marine life around the Galapagos Islands: here.